Post on 15-Apr-2017
BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH
© Frost & Sullivan 2015 1 “We Accelerate Growth”
BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH
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Contents
Industry Challenges .............................................................................................. 3
New Product Attributes and Customer Impact .......................................................... 4
Conclusion........................................................................................................... 7
Understanding New Product Innovation ......................................................................... 8
Key Benchmarking Criteria .................................................................................... 8
Best Practice Award Analysis for Apervita ...................................................................... 9
Decision Support Scorecard ................................................................................... 9
New Product Attributes ....................................................................................... 10
Customer Impact ............................................................................................... 10
Decision Support Matrix ...................................................................................... 11
The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards ..................... 12
Research Methodology ........................................................................................ 12
About Frost & Sullivan .............................................................................................. 12
Copyright ...................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
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Background and Company Performance Industry Challenges
Frost & Sullivan recognizes that three big forces are coming together to drive the interest
in data analytics in healthcare—1) the increased volume and movement of digitized data
from insurance and billing information systems, electronic health records (EHRs), medical
devices, wearable sensors, consumer mobile devices, and, increasingly, social and public
health systems; 2) healthcare reform prioritizing improvements in patient care quality and
cost efficiency, and; 3) payment reform, specifically, the move to value-based
reimbursement that depends on assessing and reporting on numerous quality measures.
Today, data analytics is the lifeblood of modern healthcare organizations that need to turn
growing volumes of data into knowledge and insights that can drive continuous quality
improvement. Yet healthcare organizations are struggling to understand and manage their
vast data resources. This is partly due to the fact that healthcare data comes from
numerous internal and external sources, encompassing many different formats including
structured and free-text data that resides in EHRs, claims data from multiple payers, lab
and diagnostic imaging data, and, increasingly, streaming data from medical devices
including remote patient monitoring systems.
Bringing all these data together is complex and time-consuming. And, after data are
brought together and extracted from various sources and systems, they need to be
cleansed and normalized before put to use. While health data interoperability remains a
significant challenge for many organizations, there is positive movement and growing
incentives to free disparate clinical and non-clinical data so that it can be leveraged to
build new tools and applications for a range of clinical and business purposes. In fact,
there is a growing interest across all types of healthcare-related entities in developing
targeted or custom analytics applications designed to perform specific tasks or to address
specific, urgent challenges. This growing movement is partially driven by the fact that
there is more data of all types to work with now.
But more importantly, organizations are finding that new tools and apps are needed
because of the limitations of enterprise IT systems to quickly address the highly dynamic
and constantly evolving needs of healthcare organizations to meet growing requirements
around quality measures, meaningful use attestation, predictive analytics for population
health management, safety and performance reporting, and numerous other tasks
required by healthcare reform. Increasingly, vendors of health IT solutions are offering
APIs (application programming interface) tools that enable users to get at data that
resides in a particular program such as an EHR or other clinical or financial information
system so that they can quickly build out custom, targeted solutions. However, not all
healthcare organizations have the know-how or bandwidth to develop task-specific
modules and apps. In this situation, many organizations purchase commercial solutions
which can often be expensive and may not even fully address their specific analytics
needs.
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New Product Attributes and Customer Impact
Match to Needs - Healthcare Organizations Need Multiple Options to Address
Growing Imperatives for Data Analytics
Across the US and the world, thousands of physicians, hospitals, medical researchers,
product manufacturers, and others exert enormous efforts to improve healthcare. The use
of information technology is key to this process. In recent years, healthcare organizations
have made significant investments towards the adoption of new information technology
leading to strong market growth for core clinical and financial IT systems. The market is
now focused on analytics tools that leverage data from these systems as a catalyst for
improving the quality of patient care and driving cost efficiencies. The ability to easily
share data and insights across organizations, IT systems, and geographies can go a very
long way towards turning data into knowledge via the use of analytics. Frost & Sullivan's
research confirms that Apervita provides a much-needed technology solution that
empowers healthcare organizations to easily publish and commercialize their own
internally developed knowledge and analytics tools, as well as purchase analytics and data
from other health enterprises. Apervita, launched in January 2015, is a secure, self-
service platform that allows anyone to author content, connect data, and share and sell
analytics. Using Apervita, healthcare organizations can publish and commercialize a wide
range of knowledge assets such as evidence-based analytics, including clinical decision
support rules, quality measures, medical equations, predictive scores, care gap
assessments, and other types of content which can be made easily accessible to a variety
of stakeholders both within and outside the organization. Apervita creates a “sharing
community” that enables stakeholders to come together to solve vexing problems that
plague the healthcare system. The notion of collaboration and sharing best practices to
advance healthcare transformation is something that more and more healthcare providers
are receptive to as witnessed by the rise in physician social networks like Sermo,
QuantiaMD, and Doximity. Solving healthcare is an extraordinary complex undertaking
and the best minds need to come together to enable process improvements. Apervita is an
exciting new product offering that has tremendous potential to quickly spread valuable
health knowledge and tools throughout the global healthcare community.
Positioning – A Rational Approach to Analytics: Easy, Powerful, and Affordable
Apervita is a self-service, subscription-based platform that provides a quick and
inexpensive vehicle for publishing and accessing algorithms, datasets and insights used for
various analytics functions. This approach has broad appeal to a variety of potential
customers including hospitals, health insurance companies, life sciences manufacturers,
and more. One key to Apervita's model is that the platform is an enabler, creating an
environment where health IP can be created, be exchanged, and evolve. Apervita is not
just another vendor offering analytics, it's an opportunity for many-to-many interaction.
Members of the Apervita Community can access, build, deploy, or disseminate new
analytics at a fraction of the cost of other commercial analytics solutions. This
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democratization and “rationalization” of what is often an expensive and time-consuming
process enables healthcare organizations to more quickly implement new processes and
programs for improved patient care. Most importantly, Frost & Sullivan finds that Apervita
allows healthcare organizations to seamlessly grow and scale their analytics efforts. Once
the organizations’ data is streamed to upload through secure APIs, a wide variety of
analytics from Apervita’s growing catalog can be easily executed against any data type
and then be distributed to any system of engagement. This is important because of the
“snowball” effect that often takes place once organizations begin to avoid the pitfalls of
embedding data into analytics. Apervita allows healthcare organizations to concentrate
their resources on deploying new analytics rather than the time-consuming and costly task
of maintaining legacy analytics. No one wants yet another place to go for information.
Apervita offers the opportunity to leverage web services to integrate with many different
workflow systems and use cases.
Design – Delivering a Range of Tools that Enable Performance Improvement
The Apervita Market consists of a variety of tools and content including medical data sets,
algorithms, and quality measures published by members of the Apervita Community.
Healthcare organizations can load a wide variety of data on to the Apervita platform to
make shareable (or sellable) via the platform or through web services. Since its launch in
early 2015, the Apervita Market has grown rapidly and today consists of more than 150
member-contributed analytics, with another 100 soon to be published. Among the many
use cases for these solutions are predictive analytics to target patients most at risk for
early readmissions, dashboards for data visualization, and tools designed to ease some
common pain points around implementing and reporting on standard quality measures
required by various payers and regulatory bodies. With regard to analytics for quality
measures, Frost & Sullivan notes that Apervita, in partnership with the Mayo Clinic, now
offers the ability for members to easily import and disseminate CMS quality measures. The
two organizations have created a mechanism to take measures in the Quality Data Model
(QDM)-based Health Quality Measure Format (HQMF), which is not computable, and make
them readily imported into the Apervita platform. The Apervita measure editor allows
quality measures to be developed and maintained centrally by one or more experts and
tested, validated, and implemented by many. In addition, the Apervita measure editor
allows anyone, regardless software coding skills, to create a computable quality measure.
Quality – Expert, Secure Technology Suited to the Unique Needs of Healthcare
Organizations
The Apervita Market is a secure, HIPAA-compliant repository where data analytics can be
implemented, maintained, and applied in a flexible and customizable environment where
users can quickly adapt tools in response to their experience and changing needs. Frost &
Sullivan finds that Apervita makes analytics portable and easily disseminated and that
requires a secure, private and robust, cloud-based technology infrastructure to build from.
Every server at Apervita is 100 percent dedicated and fully controlled and maintained by
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Apervita and its data service vendors. Its unified platform runs on the document-oriented
MongoDB database. Apervita says using MongoDB helps overcome common problems
associated with legacy database technology such as its ability to eliminate costly and rigid
data models, separating analytics from underlying data so they can be applied anywhere.
In addition, MongoDB specifically addresses problems associated with large volumes of
diverse data sources, a key technology consideration for healthcare organizations, and
also enables scalability which is vital to enable growth. Apervita is constantly improving
their platform with rigorous quality and assurance and testing, including adding encryption
and security features such as enhanced tracking and auditing.
Customer Service Experience – Multiple Choices for Sharing or Commercializing
Knowledge Assets
Apervita enables healthcare organizations to publish and distribute for free and/or
generate a revenue stream by commercializing their knowledge assets. Knowledge assets
of all types can be developed, maintained, exchanged, commercialized. This can be more
than analytics, in the form of ontologies (standard, proprietary, etc.) and relationships
between them such as mappings, value sets, etc., creating a leapfrog over previous
interoperability efforts by allowing standards and best practice to evolve. Apervita ’s
customers can be hospitals, physicians, IDNs, health plans, pharmaceutical manufacturers
or retailers. The company says that the most interest so far has been from hospitals and
health systems. These organizations often have internal staff and functions devoted to
various analytics activities because they are increasingly pressed to understand how to
measure quality and outcomes, particularly to prepare for value-based reimbursement
initiatives like shared savings and bundled payments. With regard to quality measures,
many healthcare providers want to reduce the internal effort needed to become measures
experts and simply focus on distributing the data/information that leads to improvements
regardless of whether they ultimately use those data for reporting to payers and
regulators. Apervita says they currently have more than 10 hospitals customers, including
prestigious organizations like the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic. In addition to
hospitals, other organizations that are good at creating analytics algorithms or quality
measures are also interested in using Apervita to publish their content and solutions so
that they can be consumed by other organizations. Frost & Sullivan firmly believes that
one of the key incentives for healthcare organizations to go the Apervita route is that
Apervita doesn’t own the data; the institution does. Unlike many other analytic vendors
who do resell the data due to secondary use rights baked into the contract, ownership and
rights to the data on Apervita remain with the authors. Apervita just provides the
platform and the tools but its members own the data, control the data, and have ultimate
authority to assign and provision the data to the appropriate people.
Price/Performance Value – Flexibility and Incentives
Apervita charges a subscription fee to users in addition to a percentage of royalties and
payments for intellectual property licensed on the platform. With the Apervita
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marketplace, authors are free to price their own content based on the perceived value of
the analytic and where the author thinks that particular market is going. Some algorithms
have high price points due to their material returns. Things like standard measures that
are easily portable would likely not be very expensive. Other tools that involve greater
effort to produce would likely be priced higher. It’s up to the creators of the content. For
authors using the Apervita Market to sell their solutions, pricing usually follows two
models - 1) a subscription model which is an annual or monthly fee for using the analytics
tools as much as needed; and 2) a pricing model based on the number of runs of the
analytic. This per use or per call basis is a more scalable model for many customers and
involves selling a solution by some metric like the number of beds (for inpatient settings),
the number of patients, or the numbers of users. Apervita also expects price tiering by
the size of the institution or other metrics to be available soon. Frost & Sullivan's
competitive analysis shows that Apervita’s platform fees are low in comparison to other
analytic solutions that can cost hundreds of thousands, or even up to millions of dollars.
Apervita is orders of magnitude less than that. Pricing strategies and approaches will
inevitably evolve as the market evolves and as Apervita gains more members. Pricing
flexibility is another key advantage and incentive for driving membership to the Apervita
Market.
Conclusion
Frost & Sullivan's independent analysis clearly shows that Apervita is an innovative new
information technology vendor providing a flexible, affordable, and highly scalable
analytics platform and marketplace designed to address the growing need for analytics
among a wide range of healthcare organizations. Due the strong market potential for this
unique new product offering, Apervita has earned Frost & Sullivan’s 2015 New Product
Innovation Award.
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Significance of New Product Innovation
Ultimately, growth in any organization depends upon continually introducing new products
to the market, and successfully commercializing those products. For these dual goals to
occur, a company must be best-in-class in three key areas: understanding demand,
nurturing the brand, and differentiating from the competition. This three-fold approach to
delivering customer service leadership is explored further below.
Understanding New Product Innovation
Innovation is about finding a productive outlet for creativity—for consistently translating
ideas into high quality products that have a profound impact on the customer.
Key Benchmarking Criteria
For the New Product Innovation Award, Frost & Sullivan analysts independently evaluated
two key factors— New Product Attributes and Customer Impact—according to the criteria
identified below.
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New Product Attributes
Criterion 1: Match to Needs
Criterion 2: Reliability
Criterion 3: Quality
Criterion 4: Positioning
Criterion 5: Design
Customer Impact
Criterion 1: Price/Performance Value
Criterion 2: Customer Purchase Experience
Criterion 3: Customer Ownership Experience
Criterion 4: Customer Service Experience
Criterion 5: Brand Equity
Best Practice Award Analysis for Apervita
Decision Support Scorecard
To support its evaluation of best practices across multiple business performance
categories, Frost & Sullivan employs a customized Decision Support Scorecard. This tool
allows our research and consulting teams to objectively analyze performance, according to
the key benchmarking criteria listed in the previous section, and to assign ratings on that
basis. The tool follows a 10-point scale that allows for nuances in performance evaluation;
ratings guidelines are illustrated below.
RATINGS GUIDELINES
The Decision Support Scorecard is organized by New Product Attributes and Customer
Impact (i.e., the overarching categories for all 10 benchmarking criteria; the definitions
for each criteria are provided beneath the scorecard). The research team confirms the
veracity of this weighted scorecard through sensitivity analysis, which confirms that small
changes to the ratings for a specific criterion do not lead to a significant change in the
overall relative rankings of the companies.
The results of this analysis are shown below. To remain unbiased and to protect the
interests of all organizations reviewed, Frost & Sullivan has chosen to refer to the other
key players as Competitor 2 and Competitor 3.
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DECISION SUPPORT SCORECARD: NEW PRODUCT INNOVATION AWARD
Measurement of 1–10 (1 = poor; 10 = excellent)
New Product Innovation
New Product
Attributes
Customer
Impact Average Rating
Apervita 10.0 10.0 10.0
Competitor 2 9.5 9.0 9.25
Competitor 3 8.0 8.2 8.10
New Product Attributes
Criterion 1: Match to Needs
Requirement: Customer needs directly influence and inspire the product’s design and
positioning
Criterion 2: Reliability
Requirement: The product consistently meets or exceeds customer expectations for
consistent performance during its entire life cycle
Criterion 3: Quality
Requirement: Product offers best-in-class quality, with a full complement of features and
functionality
Criterion 4: Positioning
Requirement: The product serves a unique, unmet need that competitors cannot easily
replicate
Criterion 5: Design
Requirement: The product features an innovative design, enhancing both visual appeal
and ease of use
Customer Impact
Criterion 1: Price/Performance Value
Requirement: Products or services offer the best value for the price, compared to similar
offerings in the market
Criterion 2: Customer Purchase Experience
Requirement: Customers feel like they are buying the most optimal solution that
addresses both their unique needs and their unique constraints
Criterion 3: Customer Ownership Experience
Requirement: Customers are proud to own the company’s product or service, and have a
positive experience throughout the life of the product or service
Criterion 4: Customer Service Experience
Requirement: Customer service is accessible, fast, stress-free, and of high quality
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Criterion 5: Brand Equity
Requirement: Customers have a positive view of the brand and exhibit high brand loyalty
Decision Support Matrix
Once all companies have been evaluated according to the Decision Support Scorecard,
analysts can then position the candidates on the matrix shown below, enabling them to
visualize which companies are truly breakthrough and which ones are not yet operating at
best-in-class levels.
DECISION SUPPORT MATRIX: NEW PRODUCT INNOVATION AWARD
High
Low
Low High
Cu
sto
mer I
mp
act
New Product Attributes
Apervita
Competitor 2
Competitor 3
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The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best
Practices Awards
Research Methodology
Frost & Sullivan’s 360-degree research
methodology represents the analytical
rigor of our research process. It offers a
360-degree-view of industry challenges,
trends, and issues by integrating all 7 of
Frost & Sullivan's research methodologies.
Too often, companies make important
growth decisions based on a narrow
understanding of their environment,
leading to errors of both omission and
commission. Successful growth strategies
are founded on a thorough understanding
of market, technical, economic, financial,
customer, best practices, and demographic
analyses. The integration of these research
disciplines into the 360-degree research
methodology provides an evaluation
platform for benchmarking industry players and for identifying those performing at best-
in-class levels.
About Frost & Sullivan
Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth
and achieve best in class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's
Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined
research and best practice models to drive the generation, evaluation and implementation
of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages over 50 years of experience in
partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses and the investment
community from 40 offices on six continents. To join our Growth Partnership, please visit
http://www.frost.com.
360-DEGREE RESEARCH: SEEING ORDER IN
THE CHAOS